With a name like Couture, you had better look good

An online journal about visual art, the urban landscape and design. Mary Louise Schumacher, the Journal Sentinel's art and architecture critic, leads the discussion and a community of writers contribute to the dialogue.

A glassy, 44-story tower called The Couture has been proposed for a primary spot of lakefront, an area that city and county officials have talked about fashioning as Milwaukee's front door and cultural hub.

The slim, oval-shaped tower would replace the aging and underused Downtown Transit Center, a structure that no one is going to miss, with high-end apartments, a hotel and retail.

The $120 million building has a price tag roughly equivalent to the Milwaukee Art Museum's Santiago Calatrava-designed expansion, which is essentially across the street. »Read Full Blog Post

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The building looks beautiful! The name seems very trendy though, perhaps back to the meeting room & come up with something more solid. A name that can live on as the building ages. Fads come & go. Couture does seems like a fad word, not a name for a building. Whatever the name will be, it does look very attractive on the rendition. Good luck with your development!

This design is amazing -- looks like something you'd see in Chicago! The Couture is most definitely up to the task of holding its own on this key corner. Yes, it compliments the Calatrava Museum addition -- more than any other building in the area. The gracefulness of this building offers a nice contrast to the boxy US Bank building. Hopefully this design -- yes, all 44 wonderful stories -- gets done...and the hotel, too! This is the kind of building that makes a statement, and will add a classy punctuation to the foreveer-challenged Milwaukee skyline.

If it does get built, I hope it is distinctively different than the other more predictable square or curvish buildings in Milwaukee. I love interesting architecture (including the old 1800s structures in downtown). There are many very interesting buildings in a number of US cities that have become iconic structures. I hope we get something that doesn't blend too much with the other tall buildings along the waterfront.

What I find interesting about the proposal is that it is a philosophical break from the past. For decades, the lakefront was viewed as public space, to be left undeveloped or developed with widely scattered public structures. Any proposal for private development on the lakefront used to be met with a firestorm of opposition. Not so with this proposal. This is an indicator that times have indeed changed.

That being said, I am not necessary opposed to this. The building is attractive, and the transit terminal was always a poor use of lakefront land.

Still I hope that this proposal is a one-time deal, not the beginning of wholesale lakefront development. I don’t want see our lakefront become Chicago’s Sheridan Road, where the waves lap at the feet of high-rises.

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